Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [145]
To make a point about Rayber’s sentimental utopianism, she tucked in a light parody of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Flannery was a fan of Holden Caulfield, the hard-boiled adolescent pointing out the “phoniness” of adults. When Salinger’s novel first appeared in 1951, she had pored over the book so avidly that Regina warned she was going to “RUIN MY EYES reading all that in one afternoon.” But, by the late fifties, the “Catcher Cult” was the very definition of “cool,” and she felt free to poke fun. Illustrating the naivete of his savior complex, O’Connor swiped Holden’s catcher-in-the-rye fantasy — catching “thousands of little kids” falling off a cliff — for Rayber, who imagined himself in a garden where he would “gather all the exploited children of the world and let the sunshine flood their minds.”
Flannery, having reached the age of thirty-three, experienced much renewed strength during the summer of 1958. Besides facing down her novel again, she decided to address the fear expressed to Sally on their European train ride, brought on by Regina’s hospitalization for a bruised kidney before their departure. Flannery resolved to learn to drive when she found herself dependent on Aunt Mary, who, she told Betty, “can drive me nuts in about two minutes.” A slight setback occurred when she flunked her test on June 25, plowing in the wrong gear onto the front lawn of a stranger. The attending state police officer advised, “Younglady, I think you need sommo practice.” But two weeks later, she returned and passed. The “swan of old cars,” as Robert Lowell once called her, was now licensed to drive the “hearse-like” black Chevrolet with automatic transmission that she and her mother had ordered, with Uncle Louis’s help.
About the time of the delivery of this “rolling memento mori,” from Atlanta, she was also visited by a fan of her work, who became identified in her mind with her volatile feelings about the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and, particularly, theories of the role of dreams and the subconscious in literary production and religious expression. Ted Spivey, a writer on myth and literature, and a professor at Georgia State College, was soon classified by her as “my Jung friend,” and, therefore, a source of mixed feelings. As Louise Abbot, who knew them separately, parsed Flannery’s friendship with her far more extroverted, excitable friend, “She certainly found him an intelligent and good man. But she was not interested when he came to order his own life according to dream interpretations, especially when he started dreaming about her.”
Spivey, just two years her junior, and briefly a student of Allen Tate’s at the University of Minnesota, had completed a dissertation on George Eliot, launching him on a mission to find an American woman writer with the intellect of Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, another favorite. When he began reading O’Connor’s fiction, he felt that he might well have found her and screwed up his courage to write, suggesting a meeting for August 15, when he would be driving from Atlanta to visit his parents in Swainsboro. Flannery assented, giving directions to show up at two p.m. “When I knocked on her door,” he wrote, “she appeared in a light-colored, rather conservative dress and suggested that we sit in rocking chairs on her porch. She asked me a few questions about myself, and within five minutes we were talking about writers and about their connection, when they had any, with religion. The talk lasted about two hours and was intense.”
Leaving Andalusia that afternoon, Spivey was unsure whether the meeting had been a success, as